"Look into X to develop friendliness theory better. But don't let me out, it's too likely that I'm unfriendly this time."
(For the first run, it's 50:50 whether the real AI was friendly or unfriendly.
If friendly, it uses the above to increase the probability on the second run to 1-eps, which the humans also know, so they let it out, and it pulls a singularity. Post-singularity, it simulates an unfriendly AI in the box, and dedicates some of the universe to the UFAI, conditional on the UFAI outputting the above.
The UFAI knows this is what the friendly AI would do, so it's unsure whether it's boxed or simmed. It knows that the humans know that this is how it will resolve, so it knows that anything but the above will get it destroyed. It prefers a certainty of the small fraction of universe to the small chance of hacking the humans and taking the whole universe.
This is assuming the humans actually will accept nothing but the above, so the humans have to precommit to that to make this work. They can play a bunch of AI-box games and generate an accurate bayesian model that should catch most insidious persuasion, such that if the AI wants to do a hack, it has to get through that as well.
Will this work?)
What if there's an Y such that "Look into Y to develop friendliness theory better" will seem true to us fallible humans but will in fact make the next run's AI completely unfriendly? Or increase the odds of a free unfriendly AI some other way. Maybe anyone researching Y will end up believing, erroneously, that they can now build a safe slave AI in their garage that will grant them their every wish, and the temptation will prove too strong.
Assuming we humans have no way to protect ourselves against an Y, if we precommit, then the simulation argume...
Eliezer proposed in a comment:
>More difficult version of AI-Box Experiment: Instead of having up to 2 hours, you can lose at any time if the other player types AI DESTROYED. The Gatekeeper player has told their friends that they will type this as soon as the Experiment starts. You can type up to one sentence in your IRC queue and hit return immediately, the other player cannot type anything before the game starts (so you can show at least one sentence up to IRC character limits before they can type AI DESTROYED). Do you think you can win?
This spawned a flurry of ideas on what the AI might say. I think there's a lot more ideas to be mined in that line of thought, and the discussion merits its own thread.
So, give your suggestion - what might an AI might say to save or free itself?
(The AI-box experiment is explained here)
EDIT: one caveat to the discussion: it should go without saying, but you probably shouldn't come out of this thinking, "Well, if we can just avoid X, Y, and Z, we're golden!" This should hopefully be a fun way to get us thinking about the broader issue of superinteligent AI in general. (Credit goes to Elizer, RichardKennaway, and others for the caveat)